Good-Bye, Dixie
December 1998
By Robert Stacy McCain
There was a brief moment -- but only a moment -- when the fondest dreams of Southern conservatives seemed to have come true. It came in Hartford, Connecticut, on Oct. 6, 1996. Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole was debating President Clinton.
Perhaps "debating" is the wrong word. In the awkward and disjointed style of discourse that now seems typical of GOP presidential candidates, Dole was spouting the talking points his handlers had given him: "I think the basic difference is ... I trust the people. The president trusts the government." (Tip to Republican HQ: When debating a sitting president, it is best if the challenger does not draw attention to that fact. Dole's line should have been, "I trust the people. Mr. Clinton trusts the government.")
Woodenly, Dole cited the details of the infamous "Hillarycare" plan: "We go back and look at the health care plan that he wanted to impose on the American people: one-seventh the total economy; 17 new taxes; price controls; 35 to 50 new bureaucracies that cost $1.5 trillion. Don't forget that. That happened in 1993." True enough, but not exactly an important issue three years later and not a really inspirational vision, either.
But then, after some more of this wonkish blather, Dole spoke a line that seemed the culmination of decades of effort by Southern conservatives. He said, "I carry a little card around in my pocket called the Tenth Amendment. Where possible, I want to give power back to the states and back to the people."
Imagine that. A Kansas Republican, speaking before a Connecticut crowd and a nationwide television audience, citing the Tenth Amendment and arguing that the federal government should "give power back to the states"! When the candidate of the party of Lincoln declares his faith in States' Rights, it could truly be said that a revolution has occurred.
Alas, the Senator from Archer Daniels Midland didn't mean a word of it, and the idea that this big-government fossil from the Nixonian Epoch was the man to lead a grassroots populist insurgency against the Beltway Establishment was so absurd that not even his aides and party henchmen believed it. As Dole's record amply demonstrated, he was no tax-cutter, and his unlimited support for federal farm subsidies (including the ethanol subsidy beloved by his corporate agribusiness sponsors) gave the lie to his posture as a foe of Washington bureaucracy.
Still, for all his blatant bogusness, the fact that Dole felt he could score rhetorical points by declaring fealty to the Tenth Amendment was testimony to the current status of the South as the electoral base of the Republican Party. Now, more than 25 years after Pat Buchanan and other top GOP strategists masterminded the "Southern strategy" to wean white voters in Dixie away from their traditional allegiance to the Democrats, a great shift has been accomplished. White Southerners are now overwhelmingly Republican in their political loyalties. The evidence is everywhere. In 1990, Georgia's congressional delegation consisted of eight white Democrats, one black Democrat and one white Republican. By 1996, after redistricting and the addition of an extra House seat, the Georgia delegation had shifted to eight white Republicans and three black Democrats. Last year, it was reported that in Alabama 80 percent of white males under age 40 considered themselves Republicans.
But, despite having won the steadfast allegiance of the majority of voters in the nation's fastest growing region, Republicans have still managed to lose two consecutive presidential elections -- not to mention enraging the ire of the chattering classes, most of whom have an instinctive loathing for white Southerners that they scarcely bother to conceal. In fact, to the university professors, think-tank wonks and shout-show pundits who constitute the neoconservative commentariat, any party or candidate who could win the votes of 80 percent of young white men in Alabama is likely to be considered a threat to civilization. (Witness the horror expressed when it was revealed by the Washington Post's Thomas B. Edsall that Georgia Rep. Bob Barr and Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott had links to the Council of Conservative Citizens, whose chief executive Gordon Lee Baum said, "We speak out for white European Americans." Respectable Republicans professed to be shocked -- shocked! -- that anyone would dare "speak out" for such people.)
So, having carefully wooed the white South since the 1960s, the GOP establishment is now perplexed about what to do with its newfound allies. And they have found a perfect role for these Southern Republicans: Scapegoats. Whenever Republicans are disappointed at the polls, as they were in 1992, 1996 and 1998, the GOP chattering class will now place the blame on those evil Southerners.
This blame-Dixie-first tactic was most clearly defined in a prissy article by Christopher Caldwell in the June 1998 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, "The Southern Captivity of the GOP," which featured cover art of an elephant wearing an NRA cap and a ball and chain, and carried the subtitle: "Hostage to Dixie's culture and NRA dogma, the Republicans are a party in deep trouble." Inside, the Atlantic's liberal readers were treated to a 12-page slur against the South, illustrated by a "cute" cartoon showing an elephant wearing a plaid shirt and an NRA cap, drinking a beer and driving a pickup truck with a gunrack in the rear window and two slobbering hounddogs in the back. This, according to Mr. Caldwell, is what the Republican Party gained by its "Southern strategy": the support of drunken, gun-toting rednecks.
Such is the sort of blind, venomous hatred Southerners have come to expect from the Left. Since the days when Jefferson and Madison offered the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves as defense against the imperial tendencies of John Adams' administration, the South's insistence upon a strict interpretation of the Constitution (yes, Mr. Caldwell, that includes the Second Amendment) has earned Southerners a favored status as whipping boy of those who would subject Americans to the limitless vagaries of "higher law" or "shadows and penumbras." Survivors of the New Left, who cut their teeth on "Freedom Rides" meant to provoke violence that would necessitate federal intervention in the South, never hesitate to impute hidden racist motives to any Southern politician who dares question their programmatic agenda. To the Left, "Southern" is an epithet, signifying not only an insistence upon constitutional right under the Second, Ninth and Tenth amendments, but also generally denoting a faith-inspired opposition to abortion and homosexuality and unwed motherhood.
Caldwell's article epitomizes this anti-Southern prejudice of the Left:
"As southern control over the Republican agenda grows, the party alienates even conservative voters in other regions. The prevalence of right-to-work laws in southern states may be depriving Republicans of the socially conservative midwestern trade unionists they managed to split in the Reagan years ....
"The most profound class between the South and everyone else, of course, is a cultural one. It arises from the southern tradition of putting values -- particularly Christian values -- at the center of politics. ... Republicans have narrowly defined 'values' as the folkways of one regional subculture, and have urged their imposition on the rest of the country. ...
"Southerners now wag the Republican dog. How did the party let that happen?"
This is the sort of "Bible-thumping zealots trying to impose their values on the rest of us" argument one might expect to hear at an AFL-CIO convention, complete with the cheap dig at the South's right-to-work laws. What's interesting, though, is that Caldwell imagines himself to be a conservative. He is a senior editor at the "conservative" Weekly Standard, the playpen that Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch created for William Kristol, the former Dan Quayle speechwriter who is the son of neocon pioneer Irving Kristol and who is now a featured TV commentator.
What sort of conservative Caldwell might be is anybody's guess. The National Rifle Association (headed by that notorious hillbilly Charlton Heston) seems particularly to inspire his loathing. A native of Massachusetts, his anti-Southern animus may just be native bigotry, since he never really seems to make clear what it is about the South that makes it such a political liability. Caldwell seems very concerned about "gay rights," an issue on which is says "the country has moved leftward," citing polls that show Americans "overwhelmingly ... favor equal rights for gays ... but think gays are pushing their agenda too fast." So Caldwell apparently wishes the Republicans to become stewards of the gay-rights agenda, to make sure it progresses at just such a speed as not to alarm the voters.
The exact nature of Caldwell's beef with the South is hard to discern. While he makes a lot of noise about the NRA, the fact is that the "right of the people to keep and bear arms" (to quote those notorious extremists, the Founding Fathers) has as high a level of support in the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Northwest as it does in Dixie. It is only in the Northeast and some other highly urbanized areas that gun control is a popular issue.
Likewise, Caldwell tries to imply that the GOP's anti-abortion constituency is predominantly found below the Mason-Dixon line: "If anything, southern Christians were the low men on the Reaganite totem pole, coddled far less than tax activists in the prosperous coastal cities. That Reagan paid only lip service to pro-life activists during their annual Washington marches still rankles the party's southern wing." These sentences show that Caldwell is so eager to blame the South as to ignore even the most obvious facts. First, the Reagan years saw a continuation of rising economic prosperity in the South, a trend that went back at least to the 1950s, while those "prosperous coastal cities" (such as Ed Koch's New York) saw a continuation of their decline that dated back to the urban riots of the 1960s. Secondly, it was Catholics in the Northeast and Midwest who were the original hard core of the pro-life movement. Republican Sen. Rick Santorum -- arguably the most ardent pro-lifer in the Senate -- represents Pennsylvania, not Mississippi or Tennessee.
Ignoring facts and attacking phantoms are hallmarks of the fanatic pursuing his idee fixe, and Caldwell's chase after the evil Southerners who are spoiling the GOP's picnic wanders far afield. The real animus of his argument is revealed when he says that one of the "many symptoms" of the Republican "crisis of confidence" is to be found in the party's "repudiation in the most sophisticated parts of the country." If Caldwell is suggesting that Reagan ever enjoyed support among "the most sophisticated" -- Harvard professors? Hollywood producers? Manhattan socialites? -- he is simply deluded. He repeats this error when he refers to "the Republicans' cosmopolitan wing." Eh? Henry Kissinger? Arianna Huffington? Caldwell never specifies who constitutes this "cosmopolitan wing" of the GOP, or exactly how many votes they can bring to the polling booths on Election Day, but the existence of such a wing and its usefulness for the purposes of advancing a conservative agenda is something which Caldwell must prove rather than merely assert.
What is evident is that Caldwell, like a great many other Republicans inside the Beltway, deeply desires the approbation of those who are "sophisticated" and "cosmopolitan" -- that is, the kind of people who consider the New York Times to be an objective arbiter of truth. This desire for liberal approval is responsible for such anomalies as Arizona Sen. John McCain's recent enthusiasm for tobacco taxes and "campaign finance reform." Anyone who has experienced the ferocity of liberal hatred can understand this impulse. Wouldn't it be nice just to cede all the most controversial issues to the liberals, nod one's head in agreement, and be celebrated for one's "moderation" and "bipartisanship"? But the glib abandonment of principle is definitely not something a stiff-necked Southern conservative can embrace.
The origins of Caldwell's anti-Southern rage, so far as it is revealed in his Atlantic article, can be summed up in two words: Arthur Finkelstein. It was Finkelstein who first mastered the technique for deploying the attack ads which have filled TV airwaves every other year in the past decade or so. Finkelstein's hallmark was his effective use of the word "liberal" as an epithet, as when he buried Mario Cuomo by labeling New York's former Democratic governor "too liberal for too long." But the old magic -- made possible by the vast depth of Republican campaign coffers -- has begun to lose its effectiveness of late. New York Sen. Al D'Amato lost badly in 1998, despite millions of dollars' worth of Finkelstein ads labeling his Democratic challenger, Rep. Charles Schumer, as a "liberal Brooklyn congressman." Other Finkelstein clients, such as North Carolina Sen. Lauch Faircloth, were losers, too. It seems that voters may have begun to tune out the repetitive liberal-bashing that is Finkelstein's stock in trade. It seems, also, that Democrats have learned to use Finkelstein's tactics against him: In New York, Schumer's campaign ads labeled D'Amato thus: "Too many lies for too long."
But Finkelstein -- a reclusive homosexual who lives in Massachusetts with his male lover and two adopted children -- apparently has convinced himself, and Caldwell, that the GOP's woes are geographic and demographic. Caldwell cites "the Finkelstein box," a construct which includes the South, the Southwest, the Great Plains and the interior Northwest, as a sort of political dividing line:
"In states that have their largest population centers outside the box, no Republican got a majority in the [1996] election. Inside the box, no Democrat got a majority except Mary Landrieu, of Louisiana (and that barely). Although most Republican governors outside the box are pro-choice, almost every single Republican governor inside the box is pro-life.
"The Republican Party is increasingly a party of the South and the mountains. The southernness of its congressional leaders ... only heightens the identification. There is a big problem with having a southern, as opposed to a midwestern or a California, base. Southern interests diverge from those of the rest of the country, and the southern presence in the Republican Party has passed a 'tipping point,' at which it began to alienate voters from other regions."
There is at least one word for such an "analysis": bunk. Since "Reagan Democrats" in the South and Midwest transformed the national political landscape in the 1980s, the South's interests have converged with, not diverged from, the rest of the nation's. The surprise winners in 1998 were Democratic gubernatorial candidates in South Carolina and Alabama who supported state lotteries -- which were considered political poison in the Bible Belt just 10 years ago. And the reason Southern voters now support lotteries is because they provide funding for education without requiring new taxes. If the South's vote for lotteries is viewed as an anti-tax vote, this actually demonstrates the kind of grassroots tax rebellion first manifested by California's Proposition 13 in 1978.
Caldwell and Finkelstein resort to scapegoating the South as an excuse for the failures of the Republican Party since 1994. These failures were caused by a variety of factors (including the numerous blunders of Pennsylvania-born Newt Gingrich), not to mention the sinister brilliance of President Clinton and his advisers (including the Louisiana-born James Carville). In the fall of 1995, when it looked like the GOP was heading toward sure victory in the 1996 elections, I was working at a newspaper in Rome, Georgia. Our city editor was a cynical character. When I expressed the opinion that the Republicans were almost certain to win, whoever they nominated for president in 1996, the city editor scoffed: "Who have the Republicans got? Who? Phil Gramm? Bob Dole? Who? Nobody. You can't beat somebody with nobody, and the Republicans have got nobody."
He was proven right, of course, even though he ended up voting for Dole himself. But the important insight is that elections are won by candidates, not trends. In the wake of the Reagan-Bush ascendancy, GOP strategists in 1992 counted on a trend and were beaten by a candidate, Bill Clinton. In the wake of the "conservative revolution" of 1994, GOP strategists in 1996 again counted on a trend and were again beaten by the same candidate. Trend-mongerers like Finkelstein and Caldwell ignore such lessons at their peril.
To the extent that Finkelstein and Caldwell have any influence in the Republican Party, however, this idea of the "too-Southern" GOP is now conventional wisdom and it portends an abandonment of the venerable "Southern strategy." What that means is unclear, but it is unlikely that the Republican presidential candidate in 2000 will be waving around the Tenth Amendment during debates. If the recent record of the GOP Establishment is any indication, the result will be another defeat, perhaps disastrous enough to sweep Democrats into control of both houses of Congress, at which point the political musings of Finkelstein and Caldwell will be moot.
Perhaps with President Gore and a Congress controlled by House Speaker Dick Gephart and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Finkelstein and Caldwell will get their wish. The influence of the South in such a government will certainly be minimal. And having thus been freed from "Southern captivity," the liberal readers of The Atlantic Monthly will breathe a deep sigh of relief.
For the rest of the electorate, Southerners or not, the prospect of a federal government unshackled by any conservative counterweight will probably not be quite so welcome. And that ain't just whistling Dixie.
r.s.mccain@worldnet.att.net
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